Two years ago (has it really been that long?!), I made a couple of posts about how to make your ColdFusion and Java applications more platform independent. The first post covered the importance of case consistency, and the second talked about not hard-coding path separators since they are different on different platforms. Well, all this time later, I actually have a third piece of advice: don’t hard-code new line characters.

I’m switching my development environment over from OS X to Windows (I haven’t used Windows consistently in many years, so I figured it was time to give it a try again), and while trying to get MXNA running locally, I came across a bug that I’d never seen in development (on OS X) or on production (Linux). The problem was this line of code:

<cfset blArray = listToArray(blacklist, chr(10))/>

The code is trying to convert a line-separated list into an array. On OS X and Linux, it works fine since the new line character is "line feed", or chr(10), or \n, but on Windows, the code didn’t work because a new line is "line feed" and "carriage return", or chr(10) & chr(13), or \n and \r. So rather than ever having to worry about this again, I used a little Java trick to make the code run in any environment. Now it looks like this:

Even with a language like Java (and hence, ColdFusion), if you want your code to be truly platform independent, it takes a little work. The good news is that once that was fixed, MXNA was up and running in my development environment perfectly.